A selection of videos on the subject of death from philosopher Alain de Botton’s massive School of Life project – “an organisation built to help us find calm, self-understanding, resilience and connection – especially during troubled times.”
In a nutshell … A seminal scene from The Dead Poets Society, in which the extraordinary Robin Williams as the extraordinary John Keating imparts the first of many lessons in unorthodoxy, recalling the finitude of life and seizing the day.
18th and 19th century necropolitan models of cemetery design and practice have created problems for us in the 21st century. Notably, cemeteries in major cities are literally running out of space, while those traditional burials that do take place continue to waste resources on a vast scale. In this video, Sandy Gibson of Better Place … Read moreBetter Place Memorial Forests
The Reaper has seldom been portrayed so sympathetically as in this depiction by the Baltimore-based artist Robert Warren Harrison, whose work often touches on the theme of mortality.
Palliative care expert Dr. BJ Miller discusses the pragmatic, philosophical, ethical and spiritual approaches to end-of-life practice developed at the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco.
By Tony Wolf The evocative yin-yang juxtaposition of flowers and skulls has a curious artistic history encompassing Catholic reliquary, 17th century Dutch vanitas painting, Mexican folk-art, Edwardian art nouveau and ’60s psychedelia. In combination, they offer a startling and provocative alternative to the black-cloaked, scythe-wielding figure of the Grim Reaper, whose imagery is inextricably tied … Read moreThe Skull and the Flower
Here’s a colorful and cheerful website devoted to El Dia de (los) Muertos, perhaps the world’s most colorful and cheerful thanatocentric celebration. As a child in Wellington, New Zealand during the 1970s, I was hardly aware of Latin American culture other than via Spanish-language segments on Sesame Street. That said, I seem to recall first … Read moreThe Day of the Dead
Minister, chaplain and essayist Lynn Casteel Harper’s article for the Paris Review compares the earliest known Dutch vanitas painting – Jacques de Gheyn’s Vanitas Still Life – with her own perspective on the condition of dementia: Wisdom here comes lodged in apposition—pairs of apparent opposites, united by the word and: “a time to be born, and a … Read more“Still Life”
The practice of thanatocentric pilgrimage is too often reduced to tacky “ghost tours” and their “true-crime” equivalent. Fortunately, the Atlas Obscura offers this open-ended list of alternative, off-the-beaten-track memento mori destinations, from Harry Houdini’s grave in Queens, NYC to the Shah-i-Zinda Necropolis in Uzbekistan.
Click here to read Ed Simon’s Order of the Good Death essay on how the dawn of the Scientific Age forced thinkers to re-evaluate their notions of mortality: Anxiety has always surrounded death, but in the seventeenth-century there was perhaps a new fear – of Nothingness. These writers deployed Ars Moriendi and Memento mori to approach death in a century … Read more“Every Word of the Sepulchre: How the Seventeenth Century Teaches Us to Die”